Memories: Noddy’s Playtime

Modified: Categories: Edutainment, Memories Tags: , Comments: 3

  • Publisher: The Jumping Bean Co.
  • Genre: Edutainment
  • Released: 1992
  • Platforms: Amiga, Atari and PC

I used to play Noddy’s Playtime all the time when I was little.

In the game, you drive Noddy around to different sections of Toyland and park outside of different buildings to activate different edutcational minigames. I didn’t really play the games, though. I mostly just drove the car around, because I was convinced that I hadn’t explored all of Toyland yet. The only minigame I really liked was this one where Noddy was arrested and you had to dig him out of jail. I’m not really sure how helping someone escape from jail is supposed to be educational, but there you go.

There was a button that made the horn on Noddy’s car honk. One day, I honked the horn so much that my mother hit me.

You could also run people over.

There’s a weird thing about this game. I can confirm that you could play it on an Amiga or Atari, but I’ve found no mention of it ever being made for PC. We didn’t have an Amiga or an Atari, when I was little, though, so a PC version must have existed, but everyone, except for me, has forgotten about it. Weird.

Memories: Crosscountry Canada

Modified: Categories: Edutainment, Memories Tags: , , Comments: 0

  • Publisher: Didatech
  • Developers:  Dave Vincent and Jimfre Bacal
  • Genre: Edutainment
  • Released: 1991

Crosscountry Canada was the best game ever. Sure, other games from 1991 had 256 colours instead of 4, Midi music instead of PC speaker beeps and mouse controls instead of text parser input, but Crosscountry Canada could do something that no other game at the time could do.

Crosscrountry Canada could get you an entire class period of goofing off on the computer, instead of doing work.

The basic premise of Crosscountry Canada is that you are truck driver picking up goods and delivering them across Canada. Along the way you learn about Canada’s geography and different industries. The only problem was that my school didn’t have a copy of the sheet that told you which cities had which commodities, so we were left to drive our trucks around aimlessly totally unable to win the game.

The the game also had some seedier elements to it. You could choose to speed or pick up hitchhikers, if you wanted to. If you did either of these bad things the only reprecussion was that you’d get a ticket or the hitchhiker would rob you. You seem to have unlimited funds in the game and, most of the time, the hitchhiker would actually reward you with money for driving them around. The lesson to children is that speeding and picking up hitchhikers is fun and profitable.

There were legends that you run over the hitchhiker or he could murder you, but I’ve never actually seen it for myself. Kids thought that you could enter in any command and the game would do it for you, but they were wrong.

A thing that bugs me about this game is that it seriously is spelled “Crosscounty” in the title. How a supposedly educational game could make it to market spelling “Cross Country” all as one word is beyond me.

On the mystical commodities location sheet: I suspect that they didn’t have the locations listed in-game as a form of copy protection. If you didn’t have the manual, you couldn’t beat the game. I also suspect that almost no schools actually bought a legitimate copy of Crosscountry Canada. They copied those floppies. So, if you want to know why Canada has such a “piracy” culture, know that it’s cultivated in our nation’s school computer labs.

a screencap of Crosscountry Canada's copyright notice
Ha!